Report: FTC approves roughly $5B fine for Facebook

FILE – In this April 30, 2019, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes the keynote speech at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Jose, Calif. A Wall Street Journal report says that the FTC has voted this week to approve a fine of about $5 billion for Facebook over privacy violations. The report Friday, July 12, 2019, cites an unnamed person familiar with the matter. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The FTC has voted to approve a fine of about $5 billion for Facebook over privacy violations, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The report cited an unnamed person familiar with the matter.

Facebook
declined to comment; the FTC did not immediately respond to messages
for comment. The Journal said the 3-2 vote broke along party lines, with
Republicans in support and Democrats in opposition to the fine.

The
FTC report has been moved to the Justice Department for review, per the
report. It is not clear how long it will take to finalize.

The
fine would be the largest the FTC has levied on a tech company. But it
won’t make much of a dent for Facebook, which had nearly $56 billion in
revenue last year. The report did not say what else the settlement
includes beyond the fine, though it is expected to include limits on how
Facebook treats user privacy.

Since the Cambridge Analytica debacle
erupted more than a year ago and prompted the FTC investigation,
Facebook has vowed to do a better job corralling its users’ data.
Nevertheless, its controls have remained leaky. For example, It also acknowledged giving
big tech companies like Amazon and Yahoo extensive access to users’
personal data, in effect exempting them from its usual privacy rules.
And it collected call and text logs from phones running Google’s Android system in 2015.

Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.